"And the Answer Is None. None More Dark." Darkside: Horror for the Next Millennium Part 2!
Envy by Christa Faust
Synopsis: A claustrophobic look at a sado-masochistic relationship.
Thoughts: Relative to my point earlier about 'justifying' extreme content, I think this one also does, but only at the last second. Most of this is a laundry list of perversions, provocations, and titillations (which would have been a great name for this blog, dang it), but there's a fantastic element at the very end that makes me think of Freud.
The Man of Her Dreams by Alan M. Clark
Synopsis: A troubled young woman believes the many problems in her life can all be traced to a sinister figure who shows up in her dreams.
Thoughts: More child abuse, more nastiness, more trauma. There's one part in here I like--a dream sequence where a woman imagines she's getting married to her mother--which is provocative and shocking. Otherwise, eh.
For the Curiosity of Rats by Jeffrey Osier
Synopsis: After their 3-year-old daughter dies in a car accident, a married couple fractures over the last keepsake of her.
Thoughts: This is an odd one. At first it seems like a straight-forward horror story that's a little over-written. By the very end, though, something shifts and it turns out that Osier is doing something in a bleaker, more cerebral and emotional register. The final scenes in the train station have lingered with me for weeks now as I write this, and by the time I post it it'll probably have been another week or two. This makes me want to find more of his work.
The Stranger Who Sits Beside Me by Yvonne Navarro
Synopsis: A family man's relationship with his wife deteriorates as his friendship with a fellow commuter flourishes.
Thoughts: A good story, sort of like "The Box" by Ketchum although not as devastating. (Then again, what is?) Well-written, well-characterized, recommended. The Midwesterner in me thrilled at Chicagoan Navarro's mention of Menards!
In Pieces by Deidra Cox
Synopsis: The physically and emotionally ravaged slave of a sadistic killer goes out to kidnap another 'toy' for him to play with.
Thoughts: Geez. If you've made it this far through the book, you're probably able to handle this one. Bleak, nasty, and extreme, but it has enough style and psychological intensity to stand out.
Voices Lost & Clouded by David B. Silva
Synopsis: A man begins to hear a voice asking him "How could you?" Turns out, he has a lot to be guilty for.
Thoughts: In lesser hands, this story would be another piece of the somewhat distasteful and violent chaff you see in '90s horror. As it is, it's not one of my favorite stories. However, Silva's hands are not lesser. Silva keeps unwrapping layers, so each time we think we get a handle on the situation, it turns out it's worse. Much worse.
If Memory Serves by Jack Ketchum
Synopsis: A psychiatrist thinks the case of Patricia, a woman with multiple personalities and repressed memories of Satanic ritual abuse, will change his life.
Thoughts: Dallas Mayr/Jack Ketchum wrote some of the finest short stories in this genre in this period: "Gone," "The Box," "The Rifle." This is not one of them. There's an interesting idea or two at the end, but mostly this is just a bunch of SRA hokum with a payoff that doesn't quite justify everything we've gone through to get there. A rare disappointment.
The Tears of Isis by James S. Dorr
Synopsis: A promiscuous sculptor finds her latest inspiration may lead her to a repressed memory.
Thoughts: This kind of feels like a Roberta Lannes story, which I mean as both a good thing and a bad thing. It's a good thing because it takes a well-crated, unflinching look at a strong yet vulnerable female character's encounters with human darkness and sexual desire.
It's a bad thing because there's a lot of sex and shock tossed around here, and any of the directions it could go are good, but it goes all of them at once. Individually, I like most of them: The idea that the main character is a metaphorical or actual succubus vis-a-vis her boytoys is good. The queasy fixation with her terminated pregnancy and the notion that said boytoys could be her son is good (by good, I of course mean makes me say "Ewwww" out loud before turning each page). And the super-sicko payoff to everything is repulsive and outrageous and, therefore, awesome.
Also like a Lannes story: The disgusting actions and impulses on display don't seem to have a larger point, which makes me skeptical (more on this in my discussion of Wayne Allen Sallee's story, and Lannes's own, below). It's not senseless provocation--Dorr and Lannes are both much too intelligent to mining cheap shocks, and the quality of the writing is strong--but it doesn't feel that focused, either.
Stick Around, It Gets Worse by Brian Hodge
Synopsis: After his wife is killed by a freeway prank gone wrong, a man descends into physical, psychological, and spiritual ruin.
Thoughts: Hodge is one of those names, like Massie or either of the Tems, whose name in an anthology is always reliable (and sometimes, more than just reliable. Sometimes it's the best in the book). This is the best story in the back half of Darkside; a long, harrowing trip into guilt and loss and grief and horror both If I have a criticism (and I do), it's that there's too much going on in the story. The narrator getting a repulsive skin disease, I like (and, together with the other stuff that happens to him, makes me think if this isn't some sort of splatterpunk Book of Job). But the woman doing weird Boschian Hellraiser sex surgery in the abandoned building raises too many questions about the nature of what's real and what isn't in the story to not be the main focus. Hodge is such a talented writer that he's able to make it all work, and I really like this story.
And what a title!
Voices in the Black Night by Larry Tritten
Synopsis: A library patron meets an eccentric who describes how the books speak to him.
Thoughts: The other story in the book that references Ligotti, although not as good as McNaughton's story. We are in Ligotti territory at first, in fact, as our protagonist, a man who seems given to melancholy and overthinking, navigates a dreary urban landscape to look for an obscure tome in the library. His philosophical conversation with the guy in the library also has shades of Ligotti and similar weird fiction...but then it all gets tied up a little too quickly. It's as though Tritten felt that the story had to be a sprint and not a gallop. I understand in terms of a sort of economy of writing why this could be the case: For the story to have its (effective and thoughtful) ending, we need the main character at the library. Here, he's already there, so it makes sense.
It just feels abrupt, is what I'm saying.
Stealing the Sisyphus Stone by Roberta Lannes
Synopsis: A sex offender agrees to undergo "The Treatment" to overcome his disorder.
Thoughts: Whew, this is a *rough* one. In some ways this is harder than "The Stick Woman" because (i) the violence and abuse here happens way more frequently in real-life than something like "The Stick Woman," and (ii) Edward Lee has a good sense of humor which leavens the nastiness. Even at its most horrible, the titular Stick Woman often seems more inconvenienced or annoyed by her ordeal than anything else. There's nothing funny at all about this story, which includes some graphic material I'm amazed to see in a mass market paperback.
It (mostly, see below) isn't purposeless shock: Lannes poses a number of questions about guilt and responsibility and justice that are as potent today as ever. One of the most challenging is the one that underlies the whole story: If we can demonstrate that someone's tendency to commit appalling crimes is primarily *medical* rather than *moral*, and we can solve that medical defect, is that sufficient to absolve that person of their prior heinous actions?
My problem with this story, and with some of Lannes' other work (cf. "Apostate in Denim", which got cut from Best New Horror 2 after British distributors balked at the content), is that it dilutes the potent, subversive core of the story with provocations and perversions not strictly necessary.
Again, as long as you're within the bounds of civil and criminal law, I don't think you have to justify what you write to society as such. But I do think that a reader can demand a greater degree of focus when you're playing with dynamite.
The Nightmare Network by Thomas Ligotti
Synopsis: The dialectical struggle between a powerful, malevolent corporation on one hand, and the Nightmare Network on the other.
Thoughts: One problem I run into sometimes reading old stuff and thinking it seems familiar (or even derivative) is the fact that you're living and reading in the shadow of stuff that paved the way. In this case, Ligotti's story makes me think of the "Analog Horror" subgenre of web videos. These videos often subvert and recontextualize mundane and conformist corporate ephemera: Informercials, station idents, employee training videos and so on. Ligotti's tales of corporate horror, which he wrote a handful of in the late '90s, have a lot of similarities to this, as do other '90s 'work sucks' horror pieces like William Browning Spencer's Resume with Monsters and Jeff Nicholson's Through the Habitrails.
Anyway, the beginning of Ligotti's piece, with its sinister infomercials and help wanted postings, has that analog horror feel.
However, Ligotti's work goes way beyond simple glib "what if a monster made you trade your life and soul away? oh wait that is the monster and it's called CAPITALISM OH NO SPOOOOOOOOOKY POLITICS". That's where many lesser writers would sit back, smirk, and wait for the praise to come in. But Ligotti is never lesser. He uses this as the jumping-off point for a masterpiece of twists and conspiracies and counter-conspiracies, all full of dark and unsettling imagery. The enmeshment of the Nightmare Network with the faceless corporation and vice versa reminds me of the convoluted conspiracies from Cronenberg movies like Scanners and The Shrouds and Videodrome. It's almost Ballardian. I love this story and you will too.
Fiends by Torchlight by Wayne Allen Sallee
Synopsis: The real culprit of the Oklahoma City bombing reveals the real motive.
Thoughts: I usually love Sallee's work, but I don't like this. The first sentence sets us up for what I assumed would be another Sallee banger, but then it just lapses into pointlessness and, thus, potential tastelessness.
I'm not against using real tragedies or atrocities in horror fiction on principle, or really any provocative or controversial stuff. However, it comes back to what I said with the Lannes story (and the Tem piece last week: If you're going to use this stuff, you have to do something with it that justifies exploiting it--if not in novelty or in empathy then at least in pure quality.
The responsibility of the reader, in turn, is to separate the artist from their art (even art that doesn't work and, as a result, winds up being offensive, etc.) and appreciate that authors may take risks that just don't pan out and not immediately condemn an author as a bad person for trying something edgy that doesn't quite work.
The thing is, though...this doesn't feel like risk-taking. This is a hodgepodge of X-Files stuff that was actually pretty mainstream in the '90s: UFOs, government conspiracies, MKULTRA, etc. "Mainstream" might be pushing it...but JFK was one of the top 10 movies at the box office in 1991, and by 1996 the X-Files was around the zenith of its quality and cachet.
What we're left with is a story that does very little new, and buries the bit of edge it does have in a goopy swamp of stuff.
...& Thou Hast Given Them Blood to Drink... by Randy Chandler and T. Winter-Damon
Synopsis: A hyper-kinetic look at the Satanic underground ushering in a millennium of violence.
Thoughts: In theory, this is a manifesto of depravity, a sizzling bullet cracking out of the pages and into the reader's heart, tying the depravity within this book to the real world horrors. "Hope you had a nice time in the book, well, wake up, bucko, this shit is real and it's Coming Soon To A Neighborhood Near You!"
In practice, it's a dizzying mishmash of stuff. In that sense, it's just like the Sallee story in that it plunges down conspiratorial rabbit holes for a grand unifying theory of post-war American violence. However, this story really suffers from the fact that it wants to be visual. The story is drunk on camera angles and on references to images becoming reality and on name-checking Videodrome.
I could see this working as an industrial metal song easily--maybe some sort of overheated Electric Hellfire Club thing--but it's too incoherent to work on the lines of narrative or visual logic. It is fitting, though, that the last work in this book, the malediction which sends us out into the world, commits the sins of being over-stuffed and over-provocative, which are the two flaws even some of the strong stories in this collection have.
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Okay, breathe. Wipe off the slime. Raise the curtains. Turn on the lights and take a shower. We made it through.
I hate ending the review on a negative note, because I really like this book. There's a lot of great stories, and even the ones that don't work generally have at least one or two strong points. This is a vibrant, exciting, crazy, disturbing read, pulsating with power and verve, and if you can handle it, I'd recommend checking this out. It is out of print, but you can probably find a copy without too much effort or cost. It's worth it.
Awards:
- The anthology itself won the 1996 International Horror Guild award for Best Anthology, and when it was reprinted in 1998 it got on the preliminary nominations list for the same at the Stokers.
- "Skinwriters" received a '96 IHG nomination for Short Story.
- "Having Eyes, See Ye Not?", "October Gethsemane", and "Tears Seven Times Salt" all received preliminary Stoker nominations for Short Fiction in 1996.
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